


but not for safety

by lucifer



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Fight Club AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-04
Updated: 2012-08-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 03:59:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/451014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucifer/pseuds/lucifer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>People are always asking her, does she know about Amon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. i am jet's wasted life.

**Author's Note:**

> Fight Club AU that I cannot guarantee finishing in a timely manner. This will follow the book more than the movie in structure! I've watered down the weirder aspects of Palahniuk's original and tried to balance the disturbing with the kid's show qualities, but who even knows if that worked. If you haven't watched the movie or read the book, this will probably be one hell of a trip. As it is I can't read parts of this without ugly laughter, so hopefully it'll be a trip even if you do know exactly what is going on.

People are always asking her, does she know about Amon. With two fingers pushing against the roof her mouth, Amon says, “I’m not going to kill you, Avatar. But I will make you a legend.” Set gloves to ‘stun’. Set gloves to ‘kill’. One little twitch of his thumb and she’s dead. They were actually friends for a long time, before now. He tells her, It won’t be death, it’s going to be legendary. But Amon, she thinks. I’m the Avatar. I already am.

She presses her tongue to his metal plated middle finger and tastes the electric current thrumming through the glowing core of the thing. From here his face is illuminated in green shades. He was wearing the mask only a second ago. Behind him are the twinkling lights of Republic City, the glowing buildings feigning the awakeness of their inhabitants. Little benders and non-benders, all nestled tight in their beds. She’s kneeling on top of the glass dome of the stadium, and in ten minutes there won’t be a stadium anymore at all. The outside, well lit, makes the building a gold beacon on the water. But from up here she can see the inside arena is dark and cold.

Thanks to Hiroshi Sato nearly everything nowadays runs on gas instead of steam. Say you want to knock something down. If you have an earthbender friend, you can ask them to beat a boulder into fine gravel and mix it with gasoline. If you have a waterbender friend, you can ask them to wrap the mixture around the supports of a building. And if you have a firebender friend, you can ask them to light it up from a safe distance. Structures are like trees. You can topple them with the right ax. But this isn’t how Amon does things. Up here it’s silent and still. Somewhere below them a hundred Equalists are moving around like a pack of polar bear dogs, coordinated and loyal. They’ve wrapped every foundation in every explosive Amon knows how to make and they’re setting charges. They don’t bend their way there because they don’t need to. In ten minutes the arena will crumble inwards to meet its reflection in the bay and the huge looming statue of Avatar Aang will blow at the ankles and there won’t be a single bender left in this city that won’t see what’s coming for them. Nine minutes. She won’t be the Avatar anymore, at all.

Of course Amon wants to destroy the places where benders are worshipped as gods. But his real target is her. It always has been.

“We’ll all be the same, soon,” Amon says. Eight minutes. “A world without our ancestors forcing their gifts upon us. An Avatar as equal as the rest.” She thinks she’d rather be with her ancestors and every Avatar that came before her than alive with him.

Seven minutes left and Amon’s heavy gloved fingers still press against her tongue, tasting bitter, up here on the glass roof like penguins on fragile ice. The demolitions division of the Equalist movement is watching the minute hand move slowly around the clock and she knows, with utter certainty, that this entire operation--from the bombs to Amon’s gloved hand—all of this has something to do with a guy named Mako. 

\--

  


  


Bolin has twitch fits. With his arms wrapped around her, close like a blanket of muscle, she almost forgets that she still knows how to earthbend. She can earthbend. She can firebend. She can waterbend. She can’t airbend yet, but Tenzin tells her that will come soon. Tenzin says it’s all part of the process. This temple has become familiar with its circle of invalids. Here she meets strangers: This is Raku, this is Suiko. This is Bolin, and he is young, handsome, and painfully kind. Painfully in the way that he hugs you too tight when he thinks that you can’t earthbend very well anymore, either. He puts his big warm hand on her head and she lets her face rest against the curve of his neck and his shoulder.

“It’s gonna be okay,” Bolin says, and she can feel the twitch in his bicep making his fingers shake against her back. “Maybe the acupuncture will work. You know, if it hasn’t deteriorated too much, they can totally coax the muladhara chakra open. You just gotta stay positive!”

She can feel his jaw start to wibble above her head and in a few seconds he’s crying comically, just how he always does, eyes rivers streaming into her hair. He lets out these bawling, boyish sobs and she can practically feel the knobs of her spine grind together with his hug. In these arms she’s safe. She’s been going to these meetings every week for two years, and every time Bolin cradles her with all the bruising tenderness of a clumsy giant. “You can cry too,” Bolin says, and she closes her eyes. She _should_ cry now. This is when she always cries. Wrapped up inside the darkness of someone else, it’s easy to see the futility of your own ends. She’s the Avatar, and eventually she’ll be replaced. Eyes closed in the shadow of Bolin’s frankly astounding pectorals is the closest she’s gotten to actually sleeping in about a week.

This is how she meets Mako. Bolin cries because six months ago his twitch fits got so bad he couldn’t fight in pro-bending anymore. Doctors throw around words like ‘spiritual disturbance’, ‘manipura’, ‘muladhara’, and, if they’re feeling really fancy, ‘psychological’. Bolin has fits because one of his chakras closed itself completely and it affected his nervous system. Trying to force it open crippled his bending. He can’t hurl stone discs at anyone anymore without going weak at the knees. He can only lift pebbles and small stones.

These are the things the council benders and mentors don’t tell you about. She’d cry now because after all this, even the best are destroyed by their own weaknesses. Too much fear about something or another, and suddenly you have twitch fits. Crying’s easy when you think about how everyone you love will be eventually reborn into somebody else. You’ll all be strangers again in the end.

Bolin loves her because he thinks she can’t earthbend anymore, too.

There are about a dozen other earthbenders plus that one firebender paired off and crying together in the earthy temple hall. They cling together, drowning survivors grasping floatation devices. The man paired to the lone firebender is holding him loosely, towering over him and weeping openly into the collar of a clearly _fire_ nation jacket, tears staining a ratty red scarf. The firebender’s face tilts away dispassionately as the man cries and he slides a hand up to take a drag of a cigarette.

She glares at him from over Bolin’s hunched shoulder.

“Me and my brother, we were ready to go pro,” Bolin is sobbing. “And then I ruined it. For both of us.”

This is Strength In Stone, an earthbending loss support group. This single firebender in a room of earthbenders sucks in another drag of noxious smoke over the arm of his partner and then suddenly meets her eyes across the hardwood.

“Faker,” she thinks, a mantra. “You tourist.” He exhales and the smoke looks like a soul expelling from the body.

His hair is a mess that sticks out in the front as though he had bangs at one point but chose to sleep on his face. He wears tall boots that are part of the fire nation army uniform, and a coat so big and black it almost swallows him. It’s hard to tell if the dark around his eyes is eye shadow or just perpetual bruising, and she has seen him at meetings for physically disabled benders on Tuesday evenings. Then Wednesdays at the waterbending loss group. On Thursday afternoon he’s at her bending violence victims support group. On Sunday he’s showed up to the temple’s circle therapy session for people who’ve had friends and family murdered by benders. And here he is again at Strength In Stone. All she wants is to cry into Bolin’s arms until she forgets who she is. It’s the closest thing she has to freedom.

Well, she’s kept two years of that freedom and now she can’t sleep again. The only reason she ever went to a support group in the first place is because Tenzin wouldn’t let her take anything for the insomnia. Tenzin thinks the inability to sleep has a connection to her spiritual health. This is why she can’t airbend yet. “If it’s connected, fixing whatever’s keeping you from sleeping may unlock the secret to your airbending,” he had said warily. “If we force you to sleep, we may end up complicating things further.” Three weeks without real shut-eye and she didn’t care about airbending anymore. Her eyelids purple and bruised, she just wanted be able to snore for hours on end. Tenzin told her to meditate more and try to contact her past incarnations.

C’mon, Tenzin, she had complained. I’m in _pain_.

Tenzin snapped, “There are far worse things than being tired. If you saw the people that go through the temples in the city every night, you wouldn’t act this way. You should consider yourself lucky!” And then he had stormed off with an angry flip of his robes, fuming.

So of course she decided to check it out. The first thing that happens is that everyone introduces themselves. She fumbles for a fake name. This is Kino, this is Ninan. The girl who sits next to her is named Asami and she is nearly ethereal in her beauty. Every inch of her is tastefully taken care of, well put together, a façade. She can hardly believe anything remotely problematic touches this girl’s life.

But Asami says that the hardest thing about her mother being killed by a firebender is that her father won’t have anything to do with benders anymore. The illustrious Hiroshi Sato is so scarred he blames them all. Asami enjoys pro-bending and wishes her father wouldn’t be so prejudiced. But secretly—and Asami leans closer for this, long hair brushing her shoulder—secretly she wants to be able to fight benders herself. Because the truth is, no matter how many martial arts classes her dad puts her through, she’d never stand a chance against a bender.

“And that isn’t fair,” Asami had whispered against her ear, eyes bright and hard. “I want to be able to be able to stand with them on level ground. I won’tbe the weaker one by default.”

Asami takes the podium in the front of the room and leads this sad, hopeful group through a session of guided meditation. Their bodies become temples and their chakras doors. Asami explains each chakra and its purpose, then she explains that benders aren’t the only ones that gain power from opening them. _Muladhara,_ she says, _it’s at the base of your spine. It’s earth. It’s your survival instinct. Don’t be afraid. Swadhisthana,_ she says _. It’s water. Don’t feel guilty for what you’ve done in the past. Open the door._

In an icy cave somewhere in her mind she finds her spirit animal. It’s not something like a polar bear dog or anything from the poles, but instead, almost hilariously, a fire ferret. It looks her up and down and then it says, “Slide.”

She opens her eyes, and Asami tells them it’s time to pick partners. Asami puts her arms around her waist and she closes her eyes and inhales the smell of shampoo. She doesn’t cry this time or a few times after that. Asami is regal when she cries. Her shoulders shake only a little and when her face moves away and none of her makeup is even remotely smudged. The only evidence that Hiroshi Sato’s daughter cries at all is the wet stains on the collar of her blue shirt and the slightest streak of mascara, dark and thin. After this she wears plain brown robes to meetings so no one knows which nation she’s from or whether or not she’s a bender. 

  


So, if she doesn’t cry at the first support groups, it’s probably the sleeplessness. With insomnia, everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. She’s a copy of hundreds of people born before her, all capable of bending four elements. When she doesn’t sleep it’s like they stand between her and the world. Each incarnation less real than its predecessor. She knows that by the time they reach her end she’s nothing. Transparent. But there are so many standing ahead she can’t see past them at all.

It was the first time she showed up at Strength In Stone that Bolin, so soft on the inside like a dumpling, latched onto her and cried like he was proud to put effort into tear making. Bolin with all his misleading muscle let his tears tickle her scalp, held her tight when she wanted nothing more than to escape, and then held her some more when she realized this _was_ her escape.

Bolin said he had been afraid, worried that he and his brother would have to do the odd job for the gangs again just to continue pro-bending. They were so close to getting in the finals. They just needed cash. As the deadline approached, he knew it was inevitable. One day at practice it got to be that the stress messed with his bending. One chakra just shut itself completely, and he was shaky. Their gym coach said that if he wasn’t in peak condition, it wouldn’t matter if they got the money. Their rivals, the Wolfbats, would wipe the floor with them out there in the ring. So Bolin, alone in the gym, tried meditation to force the chakra open. Instead he had a seizure. Mako was the one that found him. It didn’t matter that they got the money. Bolin with twitch fits was out for the count, Mako refused to play without his brother, and suddenly team Fire Ferrets was history.

Mako promised not to do jobs for the mob anymore and just does odd work every now and then at the power plant to pay for Bolin’s housing at an earthbender temple where they give him acupuncture and foot massages and teach him every known aspect of a human’s spiritual self. Bolin doesn’t know what else his brother is doing or where he lives. Whenever he asks, Mako just tells him not to worry about it.

This is what she thought about as Bolin wrapped around her and put his chin on top of her head. Then, for the first time in what felt like eternity, she clung to him and just cried. For the first time she knew with certainty that the darkness within herself was whole and complete because it existed in other people. It was the truest thing she ever had.

All this happened her first time at Strength In Stone. This was two years ago, and Bolin has made her cry nearly every session since then. She didn’t bother to try and reach Aang like Tenzin asked. She didn’t care about the airbending. She was finally free.

She has never been mugged by a waterbender and she has never fallen ill and lost her ability to firebend. At a meeting Asami tries to ask her who she lost to a bender and she stutters trying to find something to say. Halfway through the seventh “uh” Asami just puts her arms around her shoulders and pushes her face to her chest. Cue tears. Cue bliss. She hasn’t faced any of these struggles at all. But now, for once, she’s allowed to be sad. She’s allowed to just give up.

When she returns to her room at Air Temple Island after a meeting, sleep claims her nearly instantly. Babies don’t sleep this well. When she wakes up in the mornings it’s like she’s been resurrected, not reincarnated. She feels like herself, and not the leftovers of another person. She’s slept well for two years up until now, because crying is impossible when another liar is in the room.

Four days without sleep. Four days hating the guts of this one other guy. When he’s at a group with her, she becomes fake because he is also fake. She gives a fake name at every meeting. At tonight’s Strength In Stone, people introduced themselves. His shiny pointy fire nation boots made the hardwood floor groan as he approached the circle. He yanked his fire nation red scarf over his shoulder. “This is for bending loss, right?” he said. She balled a fist in the side of her nationless brown pants. Then he said, “Alright then. I’m Mako.”

Nobody bothered to tell Mako what type of bending. But with that introduction she knew instantly who he was, and suddenly her heart soared as she realized he might be here to check on Bolin. Maybe he just had the wrong groups. Maybe he’d just been checking the temples out. Maybe she’d be able to cry again, even if he remembered seeing her at the other groups.

But Mako only put his hand on Bolin’s shoulder for a moment in passing before sitting down, and Bolin didn’t even bother telling the group the truth. She thought, grasping at strings, that maybe he had lost his bending too somehow and just wanted to be in the same session as his brother, even if it wasn’t the right one. But Bolin hugged her while she peeked over his shoulder to see Mako light a cigarette with a flick of his thumb when he thought no one was looking, and Bolin hugged her as her grip tightened with rage against his back. Mako met her eyes over Bolin’s shoulder while smoking and then _smirked_.

All these people are here to bite the electrically charged fingers pushing against their tongues, but Mako knows she’s a faker. Mako, this big tourist. His lie reflected her lie, and suddenly she felt nothing. If this keeps up, she’ll see him next at Moving Forward, the group for people bereaved by benders. She’ll sit next to him instead of Asami, and after they’re led through meditation, after she practices opening her chakras, after the fire ferret tells her to slide again, it’ll be time for everyone to hug it out. She’ll wrap herself around Mako with the same pressure her fingers are digging into Bolin, who doesn’t care because he’s all muscle and it doesn’t hurt him. She’ll grab wiry thin Mako and press her cheek to his cheek, avoiding the burning end of that cigarette. Mako, she’ll yell into his ear. You asshole, I need this. Get out. These people are the only thing I’ve ever had. I can’t sleep anymore and I need this, Mako. Just leave. Get out, Mako. _Get out_.

 


	2. i am jet's lungs.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Amon works as a waiter at a fancy tea shop for rich old people, and Amon’s a reserve projectionist for any theatres that need the extra hand. She doesn’t know how long Amon had been working on all those nights she couldn’t sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was in a World of Warcraft induced coma, so this is later than it should be. And there's only one drawing, but it's a good one, so there's that.  
> This is largely unedited because I just needed it to be over with so, uh, sorry in advance!

  


 

You wake up at Capital Island Harbor. You wake up at the Northern Water Tribe.

When the huge hulking ships make their way through the icy waters of the North Pole she closes her eyes and thinks about the vessels crossing icebergs. She thinks about hulls buckling and crews drowning. She thinks about the cool ocean consuming her, completely helpless, until she remembers she’s a waterbender.

This is how she meets Amon.

You wake up at Kyoshi Island.

You wake up at Ba Sing Se.

You wake up at Republic City.

Amon worked part time as a theatre projectionist. Whenever someone called in sick at a cinema Amon went in their stead. Amon only works at night because this is how he is. Some people are night people. Some people are day people. She could only work during the day.

You wake up at the Southern Water Tribe.

On the long trips from one end of the ocean to another she’d sit with her legs dangling over the edge of the ships and stare blankly into the surface of the sea. She prayed for freak storms, for the Unagi to slide right out of the water and swallow them whole. She prayed for a dragon to fall out of the sky and roast them alive on the water.

You wake up at Chameleon Bay.

In the smoky projection booth at the back of a theatre, Amon did changeovers. With changeovers, you have two projectors in a booth and one of them running. Movies get split up into six or seven reels that have to be played in order. The second projector has the second reel of film in it. Changeovers are when the reels get switched and the first projector has to be stopped the moment you start the second one. Then reel one is replaced by reel three. Even that gets switched when the time comes for reel five. She knows this because Amon knows this.

A switch, and you wake up at Air Temple Island. In Tenzin’s collection, there are hundreds of scrolls in the library that detail bending techniques. Each is painstakingly illustrated, some ancient and fragile. She squints at the faces of the earthbenders demonstrating ways to cripple a man. Their eyes are placid brushstrokes, devoid of emotion. In the drawing where the earthbender aligns his arms and legs in the proper position to crush the bones of his partner’s ankles with stone, neither shows any hint of pain or fear. They are calm and systematic in their violence. She practices the technique in the dark library by a flickering oil lamp, while somewhere behind her, Amon is laughing at her. She tries to remember why or how Amon got there in the first place, but she blinks, and suddenly she’s back on a mammoth of a warship during peacetime on her way back to Republic City.

You wake up in the general’s bed. Sometimes when her destinations coincide with the United Nations Navy Fleet patrols she hitches a ride with General Iroh. Councilman Tarrlok says it looks good to have them working together. With a hundred crammed bunk bed rooms on board and a three day journey, Iroh offers her his lodgings, because she’s the Avatar, and he refuses to give her anything but the finest hospitality. And he doesn’t know about the insomnia. So she spends the nights staring at the glinting medals on his uniform from where it hangs on the door of a wardrobe, wondering whether or not he really wanted to give up his superfluously elegant bed or if Tarrlok just ordered him to.

A changeover. Amon works as a waiter at a fancy tea shop for rich old people, and Amon’s a reserve projectionist for any theatres that need the extra hand. She doesn’t know how long Amon had been working on all those nights she couldn’t sleep. Because of the two projectors, he has to stand at the ready to make the switch at the exact second so the audience doesn’t even notice when the first reel ends and the second begins. There are these white dots on the top right hand corner of a screen. They’re a warning that signifies the end of a reel. “In the business, they’re called ‘cigarette burns’,” Amon says. The first dot is the two minute warning. Start the second projector. The second white dot is the five second warning. The smoky booth is hot from the projector bulbs and relentlessly loud as six feet of film snaps past the lens, sixty frames per second. A bell rings before the first roll cuts out, and with one hand on each lens shutter, Amon shuts off the first projector and flips on the second. Seamless.

Projectionists do things they shouldn’t do. The bell is on the feed reel so the projectionist can nap if they need to catch up on lost sleep. But not every projector has the alarm. So sometimes late at night Amon will wake up in the dark, horrified that he missed a reel change, that the film has run out while he was sleeping and the audience is now shouting their complaints. He is afraid he has done something wrong. Something a projectionist shouldn’t do is take frames from other movies and put them in others. Amon calls himself an artist. He has hundreds of frames he filmed himself of a single white mask with the rising sun a crimson circle across its forehead. Film only comes in black and white, but he has taken every single one of these frames and carefully painted the red in afterwards. He says it’s something of a signature.

You wake up at a military compound in the Southern Water Tribe.

“You know, half of the army went onshore to their new posts while you were sleeping,” Iroh tells her. “The ship’s nearly empty. Relax. Move around more. You don’t have to avoid as many people.” She sits up from where she’s got her legs dangling off the edge at the very pointed bow and looks at him. He stands perfectly tall above her. “What makes you think I’m avoiding people?” she asks him.

He smiles and the dimples in his cheeks get deeper. “Because the only time you want to come out is when everyone else is sleeping,” he says.

In the moonlight the medals on his coat glint and she says, “Okay. But it’s better if not too many people see me.”

Walking down the empty steel corridors, her mind uncoils like a length of wire. He tells her to sleep well, and for a short while she doesn’t think about this ship sinking the bottom of the sea at all. She counts minutes while lying between expensive red sheets because there are no portholes on this level of the ship and no moon or sun with which to mark time. Sometimes her nights pass in what seems like five minutes.

This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.

You wake up at Ba Sing Se again.

Amon is a bored, cunning projectionist, so he starts taking single frames of that mask with its crimson circle and splicing them into films. In this masterpiece of cinema, a sky bison has just ambled cluelessly through a crowded marketplace and trampled a cart of cabbage. As the poor vendor comically bemoans his loss, a bright red circle and mask flash across the screen. If you divide a second into sixty tiny equal parts, that’s how long Amon’s mask is there. One single frame.

You wake up at Kyoshi Island again. She hates traveling like this. Tenzin sends her all over the place to learn new techniques, to consult other bending masters, and have her posture corrected. Each so-called master imparts to her new advice. Walk with wider steps; it will focus your earthbending. Drink more tea; it will strengthen the core of your firebending. Perhaps you should wear makeup—those shadows beneath your eyes won’t get you any boys. Tarrlok and the council encourages these trips, but mostly only because Tarrlok sends her on shitty errands to give unpleasant messages to other authority figures who don’t want to hear it. Tarrlok is well-groomed and likes telling people him and her work together as a team. But Tenzin tries to keep her out of the spotlight because she’s still in training, so no one actually knows who she is; they just hear whatever stories Tarrlok chooses to bring up in front of reporters to make himself look good.

Here is a story that doesn’t make him look good at all: an earthbender policeman in Ba Sing Se assaults a non-bender without apparent reason. The non-bender did not resist arrest. There was no threat of violence. He surrendered peacefully. But for some reason, he ends up with shattered ankles.

Find the non-bender’s average income for a year. Find out who is in their family and if anyone is sick. Find out if anyone he knows is struggling. If the cost of paying him off and putting the policeman on “paid leave” for a month is more expensive than a lawsuit, the police brutality case will be taken to court. If not, oh well. Even the police have accidents. A slip of the finger for a bender can end in all sorts of disasters.  

She knows she is Tarrlok’s favourite accessory. He gives her scrolls with wax seals on them to hand to officials in major cities, and everywhere she goes she is greeted by irritated looking people with flares of real anger just waiting for her once they open them. She knows the story of every scroll by heart. Broken wrists here, a lawsuit there. These people care next to nothing that she’s the Avatar. To them she just another messenger with bad news. Just another court case. Just another crippled non-bender.

And Iroh asks her why she looks so tired all the time.

You wake up at Chameleon Bay, again.

Amon spliced the mask into everything after that. No one could see it, but if they blinked at the right moment, a green orb felt like it was burned into the inside of their eyelids. People left movies feeling uncomfortable when Amon worked the projectors.

She closes her eyes and thinks about clogged pipelines bursting, explosions wrecking the ship from the inside and the hull buckling and bursting outward. She prays for sudden typhoons and freak storms to throw them about before finally crushing them beneath the sea. From here the engine is a dull buzzing that tickles her bones. Here she and Amon meet by accident.

You wake up on deck of the ship.

They were the only people on deck of the ship.

Amon says, “Did you know that if you mix enough gasoline and gravel together you can make an explosive?”

No. She didn’t know that. She sits up from the edge.

“It’s called napalm.” Amon’s voice is deep and has an edge of sharpness. His elbows are on the railing. “Quite a fall you could have taken there,” he says. He enunciates every word as if time is less important than the things he has to say. “If you had rolled off in your sleep.”

“It wouldn’t matter,” she says uncertainly. “I’m a waterbender.”

“Of course you are.” Amon puts his hand out. She takes it and he pulls her up, then he lets go, laughs shortly, hoarsely—and shakes her hand once. “Amon,” he says by way of introduction.

“Well, Amon, even if I weren’t a waterbender, there’s floatation devices stowed all over this ship,” she tells him.

“I’m sure they would be very helpful in the case of a sudden storm,” Amon grins, smile sort of wild about the edges. “It’s good you’re a waterbender.”

“Well…” She stumbles on words. “What about you? What do you do?”

“What _should_ I do?” he asks.

“I meant for a living.” Her lips quirk.

“Do you really care?”

She blinks. “Well, there’s got to be some reason you’re getting a ride on a _navy_ ship.”

Amon just sort of raises his eyebrows at her. “Business.” He reaches for a bag sitting on the metal deck beside his feet.

“Hey, we have the same bag.”

Amon pauses, smirks at her, then flips it open. “I make and I sell soap,” he explains. He hands her a bar, and she turns it over in her hands.

“Huh.”

“If you add nitric acid to the soap while you’re making it you will end up with nitroglycerin,” he informs her.

“Uh?” She glances at him, then inspects the bar with newfound interest. “Cool.”

Amon still has that smirk on his face as he hands her a tiny card with his number on it. _Zhǐ Street Soap Company_. She thumbs the edges, then smiles back at him. She tells him, “You are by far the most interesting person I’ve met on this boat.”

His grin only widens. “What about off the boat?”

She laughs and shakes her head. He reaches into the pocket of the red jacket he’s wearing and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He’s about to reach for a lighter when she waves at him to stop, reaches out, snaps her fingers together, and a tiny flame appears right under his nose. Amon studies her intensely and smoke leaves his mouth on an exhale.

“Alright. How’s that going for you?”

“What?”

“Being the Avatar.”

She considers this. “Fine, I guess.”

He lets out one short laugh then puts a hand on her shoulder, hiking the bag of soap up onto his own. They’re at the end of the journey. The boat is pulling into the port.

“I’ll be seeing you, Avatar.”

You wake up, and it’s just enough.

His name was Amon, and he was a movie projectionist and a tea shop waiter and he gave her his phone number. This is how they met. Now she thinks about the ship sinking, but it’s no longer a wish or a request to the gods. With a bar of soap in one hand it’s maybe more of a possibility.

\--

Her eyes snap open in the middle of Asami’s support group. All the usual people are here, tonight, and they introduce themselves as they always do. Then Asami smiles and says, “Everyone, this is Mako. This is his first time with us.”

Hi, Mako, everyone murmurs back.

Faker.

Nobody here refers to murderers by name. Every bender that’s ever harmed one of these people’s family members is referred to by obscure things—pronouns, ‘that man’, the mysterious and faceless other. The one that ‘inspired’ them to come here. Everyone’s always feeling better. Or sometimes a death anniversary passes and it’s a sad day. Sometimes it’s someone’s birthday, but they’re no longer in this world because a firebender burned them into the next one. That’s a sad day, too. Everyone gets to be sad for that one person. But you know, over all, they’re still feeling better. After introductions, Asami announces before everyone that she has good news.

Asami tells them all that she’s no longer afraid to face a bender if she has to.

Mako is sitting at the end of her row and out of the corner of her eye she can see a cloud of smoke rising from his cigarette.

Asami says she knows _just_ how to defend herself now. Her green eyes burn as she says it.

The bastard used a lighter at this meeting instead of his bending.

Asami says it’s time for guided meditation.

This time there isn’t a fire ferret in that icy cave of her subconscious. This time Mako is just sitting there, skin reflecting blue like the ice. His elbows are on his knees, and smoke obscures his face. He looks her up and down and says, as though it’s obvious, “Slide.”

 She opens her eyes. Her chakras stay closed.

“Pick someone special to you tonight,” Asami says on the other side of the room. She looks at Asami, the realest thing here, then pushes past everyone else beginning to pair up and makes a beeline for Mako, the liar.

Cigarette between his lips, he’s getting tea at the rickety refreshments table. She grabs him just above the elbow. “We need to talk,” she hisses. He looks at her, then at his tea. He looks at her, then huffs a hazy breath and tries to elbow her hand off. She tightens her fingers.

“Fine. What do you want?” He taps the end of his cigarette over her arm and she snatches her hand back to avoid being burned.

“I know you’re faking it, Mako,” she says accusingly, and crosses her arms. “I know you didn’t lose your earthbending. I know you aren’t having trouble with your chakras. And I know you shouldn’t be here.”

“Neither should you.”

Asami’s voice, so genuine, encourages from somewhere behind them: “Get to really know each other.” So she crowds closer to Mako. His eyes narrow at her.

“I’ve seen you. At Strength In Stone? With your brother? He told me about you,” she says lowly. “You’re a firebender—“

“And I’ve seen you practicing this,” Mako says, irritated.

“What?”

“Telling me off.”

There are footsteps behind them, and Mako puts one arm loosely around her shoulder. He sucks in on his cigarette, and before she can shove him off, Asami walks by, smiles, and tells them, “Share yourself, guys.”

Mako digs his bony fingers into her shoulder blade, so she reaches around and does the same, trying to avoid touching him anywhere else. Inches away from his face she still can’t tell whether or not the dark smudges around his eyes are bruises. Mako breathes smoke into her face and she squints her own eyes shut. “Is this going the way you wanted it to?” he mutters coldly.

“I’ll tell them about you,” she threatens.

“Go ahead.”

Around them, people start to cry.

“I’ve been coming here for over a year, you don’t want to get into this,” she whispers.

Mako frowns. “Why do you do it?”

“Why do _you_?” she says harshly.

Mako just takes another drag and stares blandly over her shoulder.

“I… people really listen to you if they think something terrible’s happened, you know?” she admits sullenly.

“Instead of just waiting for their turn to speak, yeah.” Mako exhales heavily, and it’s almost a begrudging sigh.

“I can’t go to these groups if you’re here.”

“Well, neither can I,” he grumbles.

After the meeting she follows him out. He takes huge strides away from her in the dark street outside the temple, but she calls out, “Hey, Mako,” and catches up to him. “How about this—we can split the week.”

Mako looks at her narrowly and stalks onward, his black coat blending into the dark. She matches his strides with little effort.

“You can have the waterbending loss and the asthmatic firebenders—“

“No, you take asthma,” Mako says, wrinkling his nose. “My smoking really clashes with that one.”

“Then you can have bending violence victims. The bereaved by benders group should go to me,” she says, thinking of Asami.

“Really? Anyone you know been murdered by a bender?” Mako snaps at her.

“No, but it’s not like _you_ —“ She stops. Mako is glaring at her, angry. “Who--?”

“It’s none of your business.” He leads them into a glowing expensive store on a street corner. It’s a tailor’s. “The order for Cabbage Corp,” he says to the man at the counter, who brings out stacks of uniform folded robes. When he goes back to get more, Mako takes the first pile and leaves immediately.

She follows him, bewildered. “You—you forgot the rest of—“

He walks out into traffic. Satomobiles screech to a halt, and she dashes after him across the road. Someone shouts at them and she waves them off. She follows him into a thrift store and he drops the clothes on the counter.

“Are you _selling_ those?”

“Yeah.” Mako elbows her hard in the ribs. “I am.”

She winces at him. “Fine. You get bereaved by benders. I’m taking Strength In Stone.”

“ _My_ brother is there,” Mako says.

“Well, you’re taking the bereaved, so—“

The clerk at the counter is giving them a strange look. They ignore him.

“You get the disabled benders group. What about the chakra challenged?”

“We—we can split it,” she says. “Every other week. You go this week.”

Mako takes the money for his clothes, pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, and lights it with a spark of his fingertips. “Deal,” he says, and sticks his hand out. She looks at him and then his hand. She shakes it. “Bye then, I guess,” Mako says, and they walk out the door together.

“Don’t make a big deal about it,” she says. “Jerk.”

“Like I would.” He whips around, coat smacking her across the side, and stomps away.

“Wait,” she calls out awkwardly. He stops. She crosses her arms and kicks a stray paper on the sidewalk. “Maybe we should trade numbers. In case you want to switch nights?”

He stares at her. “Right,” he says flatly.

They exchange numbers on pages torn from a pamphlet from the temple. He stares at her number, scrawled across an advertisement for incense, then steps into the first lane of traffic again. A satomobile screeches to a halt an inch away from his feet and honks but he ignores it completely. Illuminated by headlights, Mako’s face is a harsh plane of piercing light and shadow. He takes the cigarette out of his mouth. “This number is for Air Temple Island,” he says, looking at her curiously. She nods and pockets his phone number. “But you’re definitely not a monk,” he says.

She shakes her head.

“You’re…you’re the Avatar, aren’t you?” Mako asks, looking concerned.

She shrugs—then just nods once.

He groans and pulls his coat tight around him. “I’m an _idiot_.” Then he walks away.

This is how she meets Mako.

**Author's Note:**

> huge thanks to natalie, camille, lucy, mandy, and anyone else i know that encouraged this hot mess and will hopefully continue to (violently) encourage me to finish it to the end.


End file.
